Sightlines · a reading
A Deleuzian reading of Twenty-Four Eyes
1954 · Keisuke Kinoshita · Twenty-Four Eyes on Sightlines
A young woman rides a bicycle along a coastal road on Shōdoshima, and the camera stays wide enough to keep her small. The sea is on one side, the hills on the other, and a long horizon of island light runs above her. She is Miss Ōishi, on her way to her first teaching post, and Hideko Takamine plays her with a brightness that the film will spend more than two hours wearing down. Notice how small she is. Keisuke Kinoshita keeps her at that size, and keeps her pupils at that size, for most of Twenty-Four Eyes.
The title is a count: twelve first-graders, twenty-four eyes. Kinoshita keeps counting them too. The class poses for a photograph. The children are named one by one. They walk the same path to the same schoolroom and sing together on the shore. Then the film jumps. Years pass between sequences, from 1928 into the militarized thirties, through the Pacific War, to the hungry year of 1946. Each time, we come back to the same places and find different faces in them. Kinoshita cast real brothers and sisters, so a child could plausibly "grow" into an older sibling from one section to the next. We never watch anyone age. We watch the frame stay where it is while the people inside it change.
In 1954 the critics of Kinema Junpō voted this the best Japanese film of the year, ahead of Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. That pairing is a useful way into Gilles Deleuze, the French philosopher who wrote two books sorting cinema into two broad regimes. Most films we know run on what he called the movement-image: a character perceives a situation and acts to change it, and the editing carries us from one to the other. Seven Samurai is one of the great films of action. Twenty-Four Eyes is built around a woman who cannot act.
The film is honest about her position. Nobody in it plays the villain. What presses on Ōishi and her class is nationalism, poverty, and the war machine, and you can't punch any of those. Deleuze called this the crisis of the action-image: a situation grows too large for anyone inside it to answer, and the character who would once have been the hero turns into what he called a seer. She sees and she endures. Ōishi watches a generation get pulled into militarism, and the film never pretends she could stop it.
That is why her face matters so much. Takamine plays Ōishi with restraint, and the character's helplessness comes through as quiet endurance. Deleuze's term for this is the affection-image: a feeling registered on a face that can't be turned into a deed. Ōishi's tears carry the film's pacifism more than any speech does. A grief with nowhere to go becomes the film's argument.
The war itself is never shown. There are no battles. Deleuze separated two kinds of off-screen space. One is relative, like the room next door that a cut could show us. The other is the whole that is changing, which no camera can frame. Kinoshita puts history in that second place, which Deleuze called the Open. It stays outside every shot, yet everything inside the shots changes because of it. We read the war the way we read weather on a landscape, in changed faces, in hardship, in absences, in a song that no longer sounds the same.
The songs are the film's real clock. Kinoshita's brother Chūji built the score from the school songs and folk melodies these children would actually have sung in those years. The pupils sing them as innocents, and the melodies come back later, after the same people have been marked by everything in between. The tune hasn't changed. We have, and so have they. The years between the two hearings become something you can hear.
This is where the film reaches toward Deleuze's second regime, the time-image, in which time comes through as itself and not just as the measure of how far a story has moved. Deleuze found its quietest form in Ozu, a Shochiku colleague of Kinoshita's, in shots of things that don't change, held while lives change around them. Kinoshita is no Ozu. He stages sentiment openly, with none of that cool distance. Still, his return to the same shoreline and the same schoolroom borrows some of the same power. The unchanged frame lets time show.
The ellipses do the rest. Kinoshita doesn't film the gaps of poverty, war, and death. He cuts across them and lets the next returning image of the class show what they cost. Deleuze would call these weak links: the cause-and-effect chain goes slack, and the viewer has to feel the missing years. The story is a chronicle, organized by the passing of time and not by one dramatic arc. That makes it elegiac rather than suspenseful. We don't wait to learn what happens next. We wait to see what time has done.
The location shooting puts the film near postwar Italian neorealism, which the critic André Bazin prized for real places and unforced faces. Deleuze, too, starts the time-image with neorealism. De Sica's Shoeshine (1946), with its non-professional child actors, is a close sibling of Kinoshita's real Shōdoshima coves and real siblings. The Japanese strand runs back further. Ozu's I Was Born, But... (1932) set the Shochiku habit of watching the social world from a child's eye level. Gosho's The Neighbor's Wife and Mine (1931) mixed laughter and tears with natural sound and song, the recipe behind Kinoshita's tears-as-method. Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1939) supplied the frame of a teacher's life measured in classes. The closest debts are Kinoshita's own. Army (1944) ends on a long tracking shot of a mother running after her son as he marches off to war, a pacifism smuggled in through a mother's grief. Morning for the Osone Family (1946) watched a household come apart under conscription. Twenty-Four Eyes takes that household and makes it a whole class.
What it gave back was a template. It became a touchstone of the sentimental, pacifist strain in Japanese cinema and a film the country kept returning to. It showed that a war film could do without war on screen and could tell the war from the side of the women and children who absorbed it. Kinoshita's invention was to measure history in a classroom, with siblings and school songs serving as clocks.
So when you watch it, keep an eye on the background. Remember the shoreline the first time it appears, and remember the first time you hear each song. The film is counting, and it asks you to count with it.
Concepts in play
- crisis of the action-image — No villain and no opponent you can fight: the pressure comes from nationalism, poverty and the war machine, which Ōishi and her pupils cannot answer with any act
- the seer (voyant) — Miss Ōishi, powerless and grieving, watches a generation get pulled into militarism and endures it instead of changing it
- affection-image — Takamine's restrained performance; Ōishi's helplessness comes through as quiet endurance, and her tears carry the pacifism more than any speech
- the Open — The war is never shown and there are no battles; history stays outside the frame and is registered only through what it changes inside the island's familiar shots
- weak links — Built from jumps of several years; the cutting carries the viewer across gaps of poverty, war and death without showing them
- dividual — The class as one collective body: group compositions with the teacher among her ring of children, the class photograph, the naming of the twelve, singing together
- the time-image — The same schoolroom, shoreline and walk recur over eighteen years; real siblings stand in as the children grow, so time shows as changed faces in an unchanged frame, and songs from the children's innocence return changed in feeling